We can't find that we were ever informed of the print runs of either edition - which isn't unusual. The publisher informs us, rather, in our royalty statements, how many copies have been sold. Even then, it's not a straightforward question of print runs, as the original hardback had UK and US editions (probably more copies of the latter), followed by trade paperbacks, and the UK trade paperback comprised some copies of the hardback, stripped and put into wrappers, and some copies of a new printing with a few corrections (see TolkienBooks.net). Then HarperCollins decided to bring the work back into hardback in 2004, for the Lord of the Rings 50th anniversary, anticipating demand; and recently, we encouraged Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to bring out a new reprint of their paperback edition, as we had been informed of sufficient demand for university course purposes.

If we had to make a guess, and it can be no more than that, we'd say that the original hardback had 25,000 copies (UK and US combined), and maybe 5,000 copies each of the trade paperback and of the 2004 hardback.

It is interesting that so few of the 2004 copies show up for sale. Could it be that some of those advertised secondhand as the 1995 edition in fact are the later edition?

It took two tries for us to successfully order, using Firefox on a PC. I think the first time failed because the address information didn't exactly tally with what's on file with my bank for the card, and the transaction had to go through Verified by Visa. The order form is geared toward U.K. addresses, though the site correctly detected my country as U.S.A., that is, there's no box for U.S. state but there are boxes for house name and locality, as distinct from town. I appear to have got around this by putting my state abbreviation in the "county" box.

The letter of 6 January 1969 was evidently the third of the three letters from Tolkien to Paula Iley sold at Christie's London on 23 November 1998 (http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lo ... .aspx?intobjectid=1369237). The auction listing identified only two of them, but quoted part of the text of the 1969 letter page we can now read, and had a different illustration of overlapping letters.

We'll try to order a copy of the magazine too, though we see that the online order form isn't set up to handle U.S. postal address formats straightforwardly.

We don't know what HarperCollins plan to put on the lower cover of the pocket edition, but according to our latest information, they intend to reproduce the full wraparound cover art on the endpapers, so it will be in the book one way or the other.

You may recall (Chronology, p. 597) that Tolkien noticed too late that the original Bombadil cover art had Tom on the back and the mariner on the front, sailing east rather than west. He felt that the picture should have been reversed in direction, but the titling frame would have had to be moved. At that time it would have meant new art; now the frame can be cut, pasted, and amended in Photoshop. Ballantine Books accomplished something of this sort for the earliest printings of The Tolkien Reader, putting the (cropped) Bombadil upper cover on the back, with a blurb in the titling frame, and the Bombadil lower cover on the front, with an oval title panel superimposed.